CRIMES OF A CENTURY

Is the coverup always worse than the crime?

That is one of many questions worth asking about two of the biggest crimes of the twentieth century in the United States. Each of those is the subject of a book by Jimmy Breslin.

The first is my favorite book by the author. It is called simply, How the Good Guys Finally Won. Its subject is spelled out under the title: Notes from an Impeachment Summer. It is certainly a candidate for his best book, though rivals can be found.

The second is for me the most painful book to read that the author wrote. It is titled The Church that Forgot Christ.

Neither is a big book in terms of pages. But each is a book that grapples with the biggest of subjects: Abuse. Abuse of a nation. And abuse of its children. And of course this is at the hands of the powerful. In Breslin’s hands the examination of this topic is crafted by a master of modern reporting. By a man who helped shape the genre. And each makes the case that Tom Wolfe suggested when he examined the social strata of the literary classes and decided that beginning with the pre-cursor to the New Journalism In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, the onetime underclass of that society, the scriveners, the journalists, had supplanted the onetime top aristocrats of the printed word, the novelists. Here is the lead paragraph to his February 1972 account “The Birth of the ‘New Journalism’; Eyewitness Report by Tom Wolfe”:

I doubt if many of the aces I will be extolling in this story went into journalism with the faintest notion of creating a “new” journalism, a “higher” journalism, or even a mildly improved variety. I know they never dreamed that anything they were going to write for newspapers or magazines would wreak such evil havoc in the literary world . . . causing panic, dethroning the novel as the number one literary genre. . . Nevertheless, that is what has happened. Bellow, Barth, Updike—even the best of the lot, Philip Roth—the novelists are all out there ransacking the literary histories and sweating it out, wondering where they now stand. Damn it all, Saul, the Huns have arrived . . .

Writers such as himself, he goes on, “feature writers” if they had any idea at all when they checked in at a newspaper, had the idea that it was a sort of cheap motel on the road to final triumph. “The final triumph was known as The Novel.”

What Wolfe writes is important when you look at Breslin’s books and ask yourself the question: what is important in his long form work. Fiction. Nonfiction. In this estimation, the vote is for the nonfiction.

Although the “old dream,” the novel, as Wolfe goes on to explain, never died. “As for our little league of feature writers [at the Herald Tribune] two of the contestants, [Charles] Portis [True Grit] and Breslin, actually went on to live out the fantasy. They wrote their novels.”

The question though, in Wolfe’s mind is the same question as when you read the body of Breslin’s work: what’s more important—the fiction or the nonfiction?

And yet in the early 1960s a curious new notion, just hot enough to inflame the ego, had begun to intrude into the tiny confines of the feature statusphere. It was in the nature of a discovery. This discovery, modest at first, humble, in fact, deferential, you might say, was that it just might be possible to write journalism that would . . . read like a novel. . . . Not even the journalists who pioneered in this direction doubted for a moment that the novelist was the reigning literary artist, now and forever. All they were asking for was the privilege of dressing up like him . . . until the day when they themselves would work up their nerve and go into the shack and try it for real . . . They were dreamers, all right, but one thing they never dreamed of. . . . They never guessed for a minute that the work they would do over the next ten years, as journalists, would wipe out the novel as literature’s main event.

Wolfe then goes on, at great and beautiful length, to show Breslin’s key role, his very important role, in this new enterprise.

. . . Breslin worked like a Turk. He would be out all day covering a story and he would come back in at 4 P.M. or so and sit down at a desk in the middle of the city room. It was quite a show. He was a good-looking Irishman, a lot of black hair and a great wrestler’s gut. He looked like a bowling ball fueled with liquid oxygen. Thus fired up, he would start typing. I’ve never seen a man who could write so well against a daily deadline. I particularly remember one story he wrote about the sentencing, on a charge of extortion, of a Teamster boss named Anthony Provenzano.

We know the outcome. Provenzano, alone before the judge, the clock having ticked to the end of his reign. And we know it vividly because of the way Breslin wrote it.

He was there to bring you into a society, show you its strata and tell you the who, the what, the why, and the how come, which is in some way what literary fiction was supposed to do: immerse you.

Breslin wraps up this remarkable portrait of a labor caesar’s tumble into the federal catacombs where he would ultimately die with a scene in a government cafeteria where the young prosecutor who worked the case is eating fried scallops and fruit salad off a tray.

“Nothing on his hand flashed. The guy who sunk Tony Pro doesn’t even have a diamond ring on his pinky.”

Well—all right! Say what you will! There it was, a short story, complete with symbolism, in fact, and yet true-life, as they say, about something that happened today, and you could pick it up on the Newsstand by 11 tonight for a dime . . .

Among literary intellectuals you would hear Breslin referred to as “a cop who writes” or “Runyon on welfare.” These weren’t even intelligent insults, however, because they dealt with Breslin’s attitude, which seemed to be that of the cabdriver with his cap tilted over one eye. A crucial part of Breslin’s work they didn’t seem to be conscious of at all: namely, the reporting he did. Breslin made it a practice to arrive on the scene long before the main event in order to gather the off-camera material, the byplay in the make-up room, that would enable him to create character. It was part of his modus operandi to gather “novelistic” details, the rings, the perspiration, the jabs on the shoulder, and he did it more skillfully than most novelists.

Wolfe goes on to make any number of points, enough for a two part series, in fact, that is dazzling in its erudition. At the heart of it for our purposes is the idea that he and Breslin, and the others of their ilk, were not going to lie flat and the let the people they wrote about “tromp” through the reader’s mind while the writer maintained a flat, boring, dispassionate voice.

This may be a long way around to saying Jimmy Breslin’s best fiction, his best literary fiction, was his nonfiction. Most of his fiction lacks one quality that his nonfiction has in spades: it is not important. It is—to use what must be or should be a cliché—the difference between “Three Blind Mice” and King Lear. Both are popular. But only one is important. In one a tail is lost. In the other, a kingdom. One is a nursery rhyme. The other is a tragedy.

How The Good Guys Finally Won is important.

It is a political thriller, and it is a tragedy, unfolding like a play. So it is a book for our times as it is about betrayal of the nation, not a burglary, not a cover up, but about little men, cloaked in respectability, who went beyond the grubby norms of political survival and tried to grab the country for themselves. They tried to raise a pirate flag above a democracy.

So, it is the scope and mechanism of Nixon’s treason and the damage he caused to trust that is one of the many things that makes this book exciting and gives it great currency. Because Breslin writes like a crime writer, you can read it in an airport lounge. You can flip through pages filled with villains and unlikely heroes.

Richard Nixon, Breslin points out in the first part of the book, quoting one of President Nixon’s last defenders, believed in nothing. “He doesn’t believe in religion, or principle or anything,” said John Dean, who served as Counsel to the President.

The heroes of the book are men and at least one woman who would prefer to not be heroes. They would prefer to be political survivors.

But in this instance, they stood up. They took the temperature first, of course, in the House of Representatives, and in the Senate. At the outset it was “racetrack suspicion” and not facts that alerted Tip O’Neill to the idea that impeachment might be warranted. But O’Neill, the House Majority Leader, came from the part of Boston where people of Harvard do not live and who was not a lawyer, thus was unencumbered by their books. He began by accruing power, and as word of his interest spread, Nixon’s power began to be diminished. “The hugest wheel in the country, bureaucracy, was starting to turn.”

In order to write his book, Breslin moved into the House Majority Leader’s office: he spent the summer of 1974, the impeachment summer of the title, with Tip O’Neill, who was a Boston politician from the schools of the bricklayer, the ward healer, the saloon keeper and the neighborhood streets. The Gravedigger. O’Neill stood up. And that is the story Breslin tells. It is not a story told from inside a loser’s locker room this time. It is a story told from the winner’s lair. To tell the story Breslin brought you inside with him. There, Tip O’Neill, who began at 15 getting out the votes door to door in Boston, was now about to do the same. This time, he would collect them from the members of the House of Representatives and he would have his lair behind the doors to a long narrow cloakroom, with a ceiling curved like a railroad car’s, with spittoons, and comfortable chairs and a dark corner to sleep in. He would wage it while smoking his Daniel Webster Cigars and drinking Manhattans. And he would wage it not with a great understanding of constitutional law, but with a great understanding of the only thing that could save the country: Votes.

Nixon’s crimes are not strictly speaking the subject of this book. This is a book about political power: how to gather it, how to wield it and how one can lose it.

All political power, O’Neill educates Breslin, and ultimately Nixon, is primarily an illusion. If people think you have power then you have power. A good example is O’Neill’s title: Majority Leader. There is no such position in law, Breslin explains. But there is a budget and with a title and a budget, there can be the “blue smoke” and mirrors that can allow the Majority Leader’s power to grow. As it does, Nixon’s declines, until, though he sits in the Oval Office he has no more power than a City Councilperson in Dayton.

It is drama, most of it, set inside buildings; courtrooms, cloak rooms, printing plants, supplemental office space and auditoriums. Some of it puts you in the backseat of car, in a smoke filled bar, and on planes and on golf courses; and, as it draws toward its final act, we are on the protagonist’s Cape Cod lawn as O’Neill gathers up his wicker furniture to get the house on the Cape ready for winter. Breslin shows us how O’Neill must delicately balance the grubby business of political survival, money raising and the listening, listening, listening to his well over 100,000 constituents with this new undertaking which most simply can be put: how to kill a king.

While in Shakespeare, Henry Bolingbroke in Henry IV Part I answered the question by gathering armies offshore, then usurping a throne from a weak, arrogant Richard who was disliked by those he ruled, O’Neill must wield paper. This Richard cannot be shackled and tossed into prison by force. But the question of how you unseat a president, with the royal connotations Americans attached to that office, is as grave a matter in this story as it was then. Nixon, tyrannical Nixon, is the king. No one understood that better than O’Neill, than Peter Rodino, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee to whom the responsibility would fall and to John Doar, the quiet, patient, fifteen round fighter who had won legal battles in Selma, and in Mississippi and battles against poverty in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and walked behind Martin Luther King’s casket and now would wage one against a man who had been steadily eroding the rights that had been hard won. Rodino was raised by an immigrant Italian father “to hold the president in respect second only to a statue in church.”

These are the characters who Breslin, with intimacy and detail, introduces you to and who are central to the action. Among the challenges they would face would be partisan politics, bureaucracy, and appropriations.

This then is the story of this book: how to Impeach. And it unfolds beautifully in Breslin’s hands.

Above it all is the Capitol Dome.

The book begins in the courtroom of Judge John Sirica, as serious minded a federal jurist as the United States District Court in Washington, D.C., had seen. It’s a vivid opening to a drama that will now take us back to the start of this quest for political justice.

It is 4:25 P.M. New Year’s Day, 1975. And the clock to the verdict has begun.

The events that got us here began on June 17, 1972, when a security guard, Frank Wills, 24, at the Watergate Hotel and Office Complex noticed a piece of duct tape covering the lock on the door to the sixth floor offices of the Democratic National Committee headquarters. He removed it and continued his rounds. When he returned there was more tape. He called the police. Arrests were made. The coverup began.

On November 7, 1972, Richard Nixon beat George McGovern in a landslide.

Nothing that surfaced as subpoenas and reporters exposed all the machinations of Nixon and his White House to cover up the administration’s involvement in the June 17 attempted burglary of the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Complex provided evidence that this act of a paranoid, vindictive administration did much to influence that outcome. Watergate, and the successful breaking and entering and installation of wiretaps on DNC phones that preceded it in May, were part of the most unnecessary suite of political conspiracies you had ever seen. The mendacity, grubbiness and acts of vengeance exceeded the norm even in the Congress of the United States.

Nixon announced his resignation as a result of the scandal on August 8, 1974, in a nationally televised address. On August 9, he handed his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, his letter of resignation, effective noon that day.

On September 8, 1974, President Gerald Ford pardoned him.

On October 1, 1974, the trial in Sirica’s courtroom of five men implicated in the overall Watergate conspiracy—architects of policy and officials in the Republican National Committee—and coverup began. The trial was one of the many powerful scenes in the Watergate drama. Its final moments serve here as the dramatic opening to the story of events leading up to it that will unfold.

What Breslin gives us as he opens this book with the verdict is something that is usually only witnessed by stenographers, court clerks, court officers and reporters. The judge does not see it. Nor, usually, do television cameras. He gives us the sights and sounds against the ticking of the clock, just as he did with Tony Provenzano.

It was 4:25 P.M. of an empty New Year’s Day, 1975, and now it was all coming to an end.

The windowless courtroom was too bright . . . This type of American ceremony has no richness to it; dark tragedies are played out in flat, harsh civil-service surroundings.

It was 4:35 on and they waited in the courtroom.

Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Mardian and Parkinson.

Along the wall in the front of the room were two easels used for exhibits during the case. One of the easels had been tipped over. The large white card on it carried a heading, “White House Chart.” The squares showed which man was where in the times when they all thought the power they had was real and permanent. The card on the other easel said, “Committee to Re-Elect President.” Titles out of the past.

Minutes went by. It was 4:40 now.

And “into the harsh light” comes the judge, John Sirica.

“Has the jury reached a verdict?”

“Yes they have.”

At 4:48 a clerk brings a large brown civil service envelope containing the verdict to the bench.

Sirica opens it. At 4:49, Sirica is still reading.

At 4:50, Sirica nodded: “The clerk will read the verdict. Defendants stand.”

Mitchell. Guilty. Six counts against him are read Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

Haldeman. Five counts. Ehrlichman. Four counts. Mardian. One count. Parkinson. Not guilty. John Mitchell mouths the word “Congratulations.”

It’s a scene with a great deal of similarity to the sentencing in 1963 of the racketeer Tony Provenzano. And this time it is the opening to a drama built on one million, five hundred thousand pages of Xerox paper; one tan-covered 718-page book of which 1,500 copies are printed; the work of thirty typists; and how all of this was used to collect the votes needed to get to August 8, 1974. And now the book will take us back to that summer and how we got there.

“The summer in which a nation forced the President of the United States to resign from office. And if we are going to talk about the end to Watergate, as we are about to do here, why don’t we . . . step into the shafts of sunlight provided by some of the people who worked for their country, rather than against it. People who are so much more satisfying to know.”

By the middle of this book we know them well, and we feel their pressures, their exhaustion, their pride and in the case of Tip O’Neill, his fundamental belief that it is always about the votes.

Though we are reading about treason and betrayal, Breslin has us see it through the eyes of the people who know what it will mean if they do not stop it and has us witness many of them wrestle the fact that they would like to survive this and stay in office.

Many of the devices Breslin uses are familiar in television drama: time stamps and date stamps, images of diary entries, and the cover pages of documents.

Then there is his gift of staying longer and capturing more detail than anyone else. Finally, there is the ability to recreate scenes and put you, the reader, in the room.

On October 9, Peter Rodino, educated at a place you may never have heard of called Newark University, sent the impeachment material to the printer. On October 10, a 718-page book “the size of a quality paperback” with a tan cover, “House Document 93-7 IMPEACHMENT Selected Materials” is waiting for every member. There are 100 copies. O’Neill immediately turned to the last page. 718 pages. “It’s fabulous work,” he begins telling everyone. “We have to get more printed.” He explains that everyone from constitutional scholars at Harvard on down wants a copy. There is no evidence that he or anyone else read this collection of impeachment materials, some of which had been out of print for a century. What is clear is now there was a book. And on its cover it said: Impeachment. “Keerist! This is gettin’ to be important business now.”

Now the paper, and the vote collection, and the battling over timing between O’Neill and Rodino, is well underway. Date by date. Detail by detail. Potential pitfall by potential pitfall. It is all there.

This book shows how slowly the hands on the clock must move, how carefully the paper must be collected, how O’Neill must continue to attend lunches and dinners—he may have gone to 4,000 such events in his career. What did he do there? He listened to those voices and what they might say about his own future.

Rodino has subpoena power now. He must select his counsel. He moves slowly. Too slow for O’Neill, who understands better the political clock. O’Neill gives him names. Rodino balks. O’Neill explains those names are just suggestions. They might give Rodino ideas for other names. Get the right name. Ultimately, it is the Republican John Doar who even the White House can find no fault with: if it isn’t there, Doar won’t find it, is the thought. It is a true one. Now the committee is bipartisan. This, O’Neill knows, is important too.

Doar builds a fortress for the paper he will collect. Bars on the windows. Alarms. Motion detectors. Steel reinforced doors. Smoke detectors. No one is breaking in here. And there will be no computers because Doar doesn’t trust them to keep secrets. So no one is breaking in there either. Soon the piles of paper will become so great that the floor will have to be reinforced. And while O’Neill is out taking the sentiment of the House, watching whether the pace is too slow and sentiment might shift, Doar is building his files.

It is a drama you could only capture if you had spent your summer with O’Neill.

As the tempo builds Doar’s team gets Nixon’s diary. It shows a mind “so twisted” that “the effect of reading it was stunning,” Breslin writes.

O’Neill goes to Wyoming, where 75 percent of the state went for Nixon. He goes because House Democrat Teno Roncalio has taken a great risk by supporting impeachment and he should lend whatever help he can as reelection looms.

“We are not happy. But we are strong in our hour of sadness,” he tells the great and good of Wyoming. It is an important speech. He uses his important voice not his back room voice. “Our country is strong enough to survive. Jerry Ford will give the nation the stability it needs.”

On the plane back O’Neill opines, “This has been over for months.” Nixon has no support in staunchly Republican Wyoming. O’Neill will get his votes.

And we go back a little at the end, when he is still soon to be president, Gerald Ford, the House Minority leader, and there is a photo of him, walking down a golf course, his hand behind O’Neill’s back, O’Neill’s behind his. When Ford becomes president, they laugh. Because they know the power of a photo, whether or not they clash in the future, this will be the enduring image of the Democratic Majority Leader and the Republican President whom he will work with to ensure the stability that Nixon promised and did not deliver.

How the Good Guys Finally Won, like so much of Jimmy Breslin’s nonfiction, is marked by his ability to make you smile. Whether in the odyssey of Sunny Jim across an archipelago of racetracks that began in the salty reaches of Far Rockway, or the improbable success of the Amazing Mets in a season of defeat that brought them closer to the fans in the bleachers than perhaps any team since, Breslin’s wit and his laugh-out-loud humor even in the face of his protagonists’ adversity shows us the humor in life and the ridiculousness at times of the all too American search for more. He delights us with Tip O’Neill’s baritone, he amuses us even as we have a nation on the brink, and often, when he brings us moments of sadness, they too are leavened by his touch.

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The Church That Forgot Christ is a different kind of book altogether. It is a story of a dark betrayal by the earthly stewards of the Roman Catholic God of their entire flock. The crime at its heart is hinged like a sacristy door. On one side is the abuse of tens of thousands of Catholic youths who went to the same Catholic grammar schools and Catholic high schools as their parents and grandparents. Who shared the immigrant belief that next to family and even before country came their God. And on the other side are the decades of coverups, across the country and extending to the Vatican in Rome, by the cardinals, archbishops, bishops, and monsignors who shuffled the abusers from parish to parish, diocese to diocese, of churchly lawyers who arranged to pay off the victims, in sums that could never be adequate for silence in the face of a pain that once begun will continue until death.

In this book Breslin, as so many who are educated to confess their sins on Saturday, go to church on Sunday and accept the Body of Christ into their own and adhere to ten Commandments, faces the fact that come Monday, children and youths had already been abused by clergy who were neither celibate nor chaste. It is the story of Breslin’s own painful struggle, his crisis of faith and that of the believers across his beloved Queens. It is more polemic than reportage. It is more anguish than even anger.

Some of the earliest reporting on priestly sexual misconduct and abuse was done by Charlie Sennott, then of the New York Post.

Sennott is a bushy eyebrowed, broad shouldered Bostonian, the kind of kid when he was young that mowed the lawns of those that went to Harvard—the Bishops and Archbishops of the Northeastern elite; an elite that is important to this story. Charlie uncovered a predator as horrific as any pimp or human trafficker that plied the streets of “The Deuce,” the area of 42nd Street and Times Square conveniently close to the bus terminal that at the time deposited plenty of strays and runaways on the streets of New York. The predator’s name was Father Bruce Ritter. He ran a place called Covenant House. He built it into a 90 million dollar not-for-profit. And then he abused, and he had sex with his young charges and especially young men. He traded money, clothing, lodging, and comfort for sex. Just another pimp.

This is told well in Sennott’s 1992 book Broken Covenant. Charlie got the story the old fashioned way: “Pick up line six” the 26-year-old was told. He did and then he listened to a story that to a Roman Catholic young man from a traditional Boston family, put him on edge and made him uncomfortable.

John Cotter, the Post Metropolitan Editor, listened as Sennott explained. “Welcome to journalism, kid. Nobody said it would be easy.”

Ritter is one priest, but his story serves as well as any other to show how the forces of the establishment—the elite in government, finance, media relations, the news media itself and the Roman Catholic Church—all came together to cajole, question, and threaten Charlie and the tabloid. They came down hard: Suggesting Charlie was smelling a story that was tabloid gold, rather than accepting that what he was smelling was a stink of financial misconduct and sexual abuse that came off Ritter, who bragged that he controlled his charity with unchecked power. Attorney General Ed Meese had enlisted Ritter in a fight against pornography, President Ronald Reagan had cited Ritter as an unsung hero in a state of the union address, First Lady Barbara Bush stood beside Ritter. The Post stood by Charlie. And now he brought into the sunlight this heinous man, who used his Roman collar the ways fluke fishermen use strips of clean squid to bait their hooks. A man who was like many others in a church-wide scandal that cost billions of dollars in payoffs. It would all come out in the years ahead.

It was this simple: Ritter promised shelter and protection. And then he took advantage of young men. Next, the Boston Globe and its Spotlight team took on the hierarchy of the church and its political offspring, the government of the City of Boston, to expose the repeated rape and abuse of children, a massive crime and the massive coverup by the Cardinal of Boston, Cardinal Bernard Francis Law. The only difference between those cases and Ritter’s was Ritter had no protection from a diocese. The similarity is what is important: these were among the more than 11,000 reported cases of sexual abuse and assault by the Catholic clergy in the United States.

In the end, with the possibility of indictment looming, Ritter, who publicly had suggested that Michelangelo’s David could be pornographic as it showed male genitalia and that might provoke or stimulate, was forced out in a deal cut by the priests and lawyers of the “Powerhouse” as St. Patrick’s Cathedral is popularly known. He resigned. He died in obscurity, except for a curious final profile by The New York Times that was almost exculpatory in its tone.

In the end, Bernard Cardinal Law became a Vatican citizen, and thus protected from any Boston subpoena. One had already been served to his residence the day he slipped out of Boston and fled to Rome. He was able to remain a force in Church politics and a Pope gave a benediction when he was interred beneath an old church whose beauty now rots from the foundation.

But what was exposed in Boston and what was exposed in New York essentially came down to the same thing: betrayal. Children and youths offered wisdom and promised comfort, safety, and understanding by men of God, were raped and abused.

Breslin’s book is a book about the good Catholics of Queens. Some of his Catholics held their own religious services rather than set foot again in a Roman Catholic Church. Many of them had kept their abuse locked inside, where it festered and caused a life of pain and grief and hardship. It is the story of Catholics like Breslin. It is a story of faith betrayed. It cuts to the bone of every Catholic.

Breslin, at the time of Sennott’s exposé, still had a hard time believing this could be true. That Ritter could be a monster. A priest. A monster. He called Michael Daly. The writer informed Breslin that the word on the street according to the homburg and bow tie wearing cop Jack Maple who worked The Deuce, as 42nd off Times Square was known to cops, was that Ritter was who Charlie said he was. He was what was crassly known as a “chicken hawk,” though his New York empire had the sign of the Dove on its exterior wall.

Later, Sennott, now at the Boston Globe, was in the press room at the Vatican when Breslin burst in. Wearing a rumpled raincoat, a shirt stained by coffee, and his glasses down at the tip of his nose, “Charlie, Charlie,” he said, his loud voice breaking the chapel like silence of the press room.

The Italian reporters, as they did at the time, were in polished shoes, creased trousers, good jackets and were fully credentialled. It was December 13, 2002, and The Pope would that day accept Bernard Francis Law’s resignation as the Archbishop of Boston.

The Globe was less welcome than Pravda in the Vatican that year and Sennott was looking for a place to hide from Breslin’s charge.

“‘Charlie, Chaaarrrlieee,’ he was asking loudly and slowly for me, by name. I was across the room at my laptop and on the phone and honestly thought for a minute about hiding.”

“Jimmy.”

“You were fucking right, kid. You were so fucking on the money on this. These lying fucking bastards.”

Then Breslin did what he was known to do. He picked Charlie’s pocket.

“A few ‘how’s Boston’ questions,” Sennott said. And then Breslin worked him over. “What I was reporting on. Who I was talking to. And knowing all of what I said would be in his column . . . As always, I gave him everything I could. After all, this was Breslin. Breslin in Rome.”

And so, we come to Breslin’s tale. It is uneven in places, and as a story of a struggle unresolved that is probably the way it had to be. Breslin, weak before alcohol, belligerent in a newsroom, betrayer of colleagues and those who thought they were friends, had through it all and a very long life, maintained as strong a faith in God as he did the people of Queens. Yet he had to wonder now: had God deserted him or had the church?

Like his Aunt Harriet, who knelt by her bed to pray before she joined her husband who was getting ready to possibly go to war, he was a Queens Catholic. He knew what it felt to genuflect and cross himself. And now he was at war with himself.

“She was twenty-one and she was going to use those prayers and belief in them to get through a war. Oh, this was no religious fanatic. She took a drink, don’t worry about that and the best picture I have of her has her eating a hotdog in the grandstand at the old Jamaica racetrack.”

Whether his Queens, or Sennott’s Boston, for Breslin it always comes back to the people who are hurt. And Breslin’s other people, the news media, somehow went years without paying attention.

There have been four great movements in modern America that occurred without the news reporting industry knowing anything about them until they became a part of regular life. The first was civil rights, then the women and, third, homosexuals, and, last and suddenly, the crumbling of the Catholic Church. You can blame the church’s condition on the Irish, who gave us total religious insanity. They are a race that sat in the rain for a couple of thousand years and promoted the most crazed beliefs in personal living outside of the hillbillies. The symbol is Edward Egan, cardinal, archbishop, who lives amidst the best Irish lace curtains on Madison Avenue in Manhattan.

This kind of writing found no friends among the those in the church or on the police who were bigots. Breslin would never be Grand Marshal at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

He gets to what faith and the priesthood ought to be about in a scene that if Netflix or someone painted it in Queens would remind us of The Last Supper. It was the Mass for Rosemary Breslin:

Then I saw Eugene Kennedy again, at Fordham, and as he spoke I remembered everything about an afternoon when he came to our house in Forest Hills and said mass at the kitchen table for my late wife. I keep the scene with me forever. He magnified love and needed no great cathedral to do it. Not even a small chapel.

A struggle with faith that brought Breslin back to the foundation of his own is an existential one that might not have occurred were it not for the rot that came from a priesthood required to be unmarried so that any riches they brought in would go, not to heirs, but to the vaults beneath the Vatican where historically they have been kept out of the reach of the poor. This book is a struggle for him. The lesson he learned in writing it is a powerful one:

This final fear should be hurled out of our lives. The priest is not going to save your soul. Nor is the building he patrols, no matter the grandeur and the glory of it. You save yourself by honest work in the name of God and of the dead generations who have gone before us and from whom we derive our legacy of compassion, of never being indifferent to the suffering of others.

Not the dead, as he reminded us in his epitaph for the great cop, Jack Maple, but the living.

This struggle for regular people, with all their flaws, flaws like his, to keep faith, find compassion, combat injustice and rise above themselves is the essence of his work and it is present in much of the rest of his nonfiction as well.